……
TREE SURGEON
After my father left,
I climbed trees. I do not know
what it means to be safe,
but I learned how it felt to be held —
woven in limbs, brushed in bark dust,
uncoaxed by the prodding of the wind
or the lulling certainty of ground
and it was here, hovering, that I felt closest
to him. He spent hours climbing trees,
maneuvering limbs to cut out damage,
ridding the world of one entrenched
in telephone wire or lingering near a roof.
I ate Handi snacks on branch tops,
pretended the red stick was a saw
and went at it, thinking I could
break tree bones.
I would move two-handed, driving
it until skin had broken, until
something lighter appeared, a dint
the size of my pinky nail.
Then, I would stop, wipe the matted hair
from my forehead, examine what living was left
and trace sounds of clapping leaves with my eyes.
I am left wondering at the ways we sprawl
and curl — how trees don’t know what solace is
but sustain it anyway. I will never hold
a contradiction like that.
What I remember most from those days:
hollow never meant empty
and ants can’t tell the difference
between skin and bark.
…..
This poem first appeared in Bellevue Literary Review. The poem is from the chapbook Tree Surgeon by Alecia Beymer (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/tree-surgeon-by-alecia-beymer-nwvs-181/
Tree Surgeon is a series of captured fragments that conjure and question notions of closeness, distance, home, loss, and grief. It is a rumination on how the mundane envelopes us, how place remakes in us daily. The poems linger in an interstices of the environmental world, the global pandemic, the death of a father from Covid-19, and the leaving and returning to the remnants of a steel town along the Ohio River. The book begins in the impossibility of sound and language and the layered grief of loss. It continues through offered intimations and excavations on how we interpret, and learn to believe in, the complexities of intimacy and attachment to place, people, and ourselves.
Alecia Beymer is an Assistant Professor – Educator in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have been published in SWWIM, Bellevue Literary Review, The Inflectionist Review, Radar Poetry, Sugar House Review, among others. In her research and creative work, she is interested in ecopoetics, forms of attachment and intimacy, and the poetics of teaching.
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